Trump signs order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that attempts to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” as his rift with Canada and its prime minister grows.

Lake Ontario is one of the Great Lakes located between the US and Canada.

Trump’s renaming of the lake comes amid a trade war between the two neighbors. The body of water shares its name with the Canadian province of Ontario.

“The Canadian officials have treated us very badly. They’re nasty people,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded that the lake would always be called Lake Ontario, as had been done by the local Indigenous people long before either country was founded.

“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’,” Carney said on social media.

“The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.”

“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” he added. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”

Thursday’s announcement recalls Trump’s executive order in January 2025 that attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” The new moniker has not caught on outside the White House.

“The lake change, Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually. As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America,” Trump said.

“So, if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean. So, maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”

Trump had been mulling the name change for several days after trade talks broke down with Canada.

The two countries had entered weeks of negotiations aimed at resolving disputes that followed the slew of tariffs announced last year by the Trump administration.

However, hours before the deadline on Friday, Canada’s prime minister accused the US of demanding “last-minute changes” that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Among the sticking points, he said, were American objections to French product labeling laws as well as French content requirements for streaming services in Quebec.

When the talks failed, Trump’s 50% tariffs came into effect for a range of Canadian goods worth $20 billion (€17.2 billion). Days later, Canada retaliated with its own tariffs on $20 billion worth of imports from America.

Ontario is the single largest export destination for more than a dozen US states.

Premier Doug Ford has said that “everything is on the table” in terms of retaliating to the US tariffs. He suggested using his province’s key exports as leverage, including nickel, uranium, electricity and, most importantly, potash — without which, the US agriculture sector would be “dead overnight.”